1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to generally to the field of full-text searching and, more particularly, to methods and systems for performing ranked full-text searching for documents that contain key terms.
2. Background and Relevant Art
The World Wide Web (a.k.a., the “Internet”) is a well-known resource that links millions of computers together. Through the Internet, it is possible to obtain access to an incredible quantity and variety of documents that are stored on various computing devices throughout the world. This abundant access to information, however, can make the task of identifying desired content a somewhat daunting and overwhelming task.
Accordingly, despite the seemingly unlimited access provided by the Internet, the ability to actually identify documents and other content that is desired can be limited by the tools that are used to search the Internet for the desired content. To provide assistance in searching the Internet and other repositories for desired content, search engines have been developed, including, but not limited to, MSN Search, Google, Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo!, and so forth, that can search through the documents for desired content.
Existing search engines typically enable a user to enter one or more key terms that are related to a desired topic or content. The search engines then query the repository of documents to identify the documents that include the key term(s). The time it takes to search through all of the documents, however, can be undesirable. Accordingly, many search engines create indices to facilitate the search. These indices, also referred to as inverted indices, generally index key terms with the documents that contain the key terms, thereby reducing the burden on the search engine.
Although the use of indices can expedite the time it takes a search engine to perform a query, some indices have become so large that even the limited search through the indices can be undesirable. This problem is even further accentuated when the search engines use ranking algorithms to prioritize or rank the documents in a presumed order of relevance for the user.
Ranking the queried documents can be a valuable step for improving the accuracy of the search, and thereby increasing the likelihood that the documents presented to the user will contain the desired content. However, the additional time it takes to rank the documents can be very undesirable. Accordingly, in order to limit the processing requirements and time that are needed to rank the queried documents, some search engines only utilize ranking algorithms that require relatively few or minor calculations. Unfortunately, by minimizing the operations performed by the algorithm, the accuracy of the ranking can be compromised, thereby increasing the overall time it can take for a user to actually obtain the desired content.